I had such high hopes for Black-Ish. I liked both the actors I knew in advance, I liked the premise, and I liked the Scrubs/Famliy Guy cutaway-style gags in the trailer.

Pilots are always the odd duck, so maybe Black-Ish will win me over next week. This week, though, it's yet another over-narrated (3 for 3 so far!) pilot that doesn't quite know what it is yet. Worse, it forgot to be funny.

Ok, maybe that's not totally fair. There's an excellent OJ joke in the middle, and Andre's (Anthony Anderson) presentation is a decent gag. Other than that, what little humor there is comes either from Laurence Fishburne (playing Andre's snarky father) and Tracee Elliot Ross (his snarky wife), or from scenes already spoiled in the trailer… and those jokes are mostly mild grins, never hearty guffaws.

More troubling than the quality of the jokes, though, is the quantity. This is a comedy that isn't terribly interested in trying to make you laugh; there are jokes, yes, but not nearly as many as you'd see on any other straight comedy, and less even than you'd get in most episodes of a crossover show like Chuck or Buffy. That the jokes mostly aren't very good certainly doesn't help the situation but the bigger issue is that the show is way more interested in beating us over the head with Andre's conflict- clear after the first scene, and not made any clearer by every subsequent scene stating it explicitly- than with trying to entertain us. I'm hopeful that with the central conflict established (and established, and established) in the pilot, subsequent episodes will devote more time to making us a laugh.

As for the cast, Anderson, Ross, and Fishburne are all very good, though Ross and Fishburne aren't given much in the way of character beyond "people who disagree with and tease Andre, but ultimately support him." This is a classic sitcom trap- your main characters should be defined by who they are, not by how they relate to another character. If you don't give us a reason to care about these people, why should we care about their relationships to each other? Still, it's only one episode and that's another fixable problem. The rest of the cast consists of forgettable undeveloped office people we may or may not see again, and Andre's children. The kids are shitty, but then child actors are universally shitty, so no surprise there. I'm not going to bother learning the names of either their characters or their actors until they earn it, so for now just know that there are four kids, and none of them are interesting or particularly well-acted. Naturally, half the episode is spent on the eldest's boring non-problem and its ability to provoke his father into angrily re-stating his central character conflict.

Look, there's a lot to (potentially) like here. The adult cast is strong, and the core concept of an affluent black man trying to maintain his family's cultural identity is a relatively fresh one. There's comedy gold to be mined from it. But the writers have to bother to dig; simply having Anderson complain nine times per episode that he thinks his family is acting too white isn't funny now, and it won't be funny next week. Race is a complex topic, especially in America, and there are a lot of ways to play with, explore, and exploit that complexity in pursuit of comedy. So far, Black-Ish doesn't much seem to be interested in any of them. It's also not interested in finding anything real to do, or even much of a character to play, for Fishburne and Ross, and that's arguably a bigger sin, albeit the one the show is most likely to atone for as it goes along. Regardless, we're talking about the pilot, and in the pilot there's only one particularly realized character, and that character wastes most of his thirty minutes finding (very slightly) different ways to be exasperated by the same concern. Consequently, it's a very long thirty minutes.